Get smart before you go to college because you might not get smarter while you're there

 I had a stroke last month, and I spent three weeks at a rehab center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. During my time there, I was treated by several gifted occupational therapists, physical therapists, and speech therapists.

All my therapists were young women in their twenties. Every day I was inspired by these therapists’ competence, energy, and optimistic spirit.

Why did these women choose therapy as their occupation instead of gender studies or sociology? Why were they spending their days teaching elderly people how to walk and feed themselves instead of working as a government bureaucrat?

This is what I learned. The women who choose to become physical therapists and occupational therapists selected their vocation early, and they planned their college studies to reach a specific goal.

One young woman, I’ll call her Laura, told me she was awarded a state scholarship for her undergraduate studies, which she received based on her high school GPA and her score on the ACT exam. This scholarship award was good for four years, but she managed to graduate in three years, which allowed her to use her scholarship money for the first year of her graduate studies. she finished college with no debt.

Laura had to take out loans to finance her master's degree program in physical therapy, but she lived frugally and only borrowed $22,000. When the COVID crisis hit, the Department of Education put a hold on student debt collection. Unlike most student debtors, Laura kept on making monthly payments during the whole time of the COVID moratorium. She told me she reduced the amount of her debt from $22,000 to $17,000 during this time.

Unfortunately, I might say tragically, millions of college students do not pursue their vocational goals with the same discipline and clear-mindedness that Laura displayed. They see college as a time to party, to drink, and to engage in casual sex. They see student loans as a way to live a lifestyle they could not afford with their parents’ limited financial resources. They choose their academic majors carelessly. Perhaps they major in sociology because they heard it is an easy major. Maybe they choose a major like gender studies or ethnic studies in order to nurture a sense of victimhood.

When these hapless fools graduate from college, they learn that there are no jobs for people who graduated in the humanities or the social sciences. They realize they have no job skills at all. They can’t solve problems, they can’t write coherently, and they lack the people skills to be successful in the workplace.

Thank God there are still young people like Laura, who understand they have a responsibility to become productive citizens, and they have a desire to do something useful with their lives, even even if the job involves the unglamorous work of teaching an old man to walk, talk, and feed himself.

Not everyone can major in gender studies.

Why are universities opening campuses in Washington, DC? Bedause that’s where the money is

 Someone asked Willie Sutton, the notorious bank robber, why he robbed banks. “Because that’s where the money is," he replied.

If you were to ask the elite universities why they are opening campuses in Washington, DC, you would get a similar answer: Because that’s where the money is.

As reported in a recent issue of Inside Higher Ed, more than 40 American universities have opened campuses in the nation’s capital. For example, UCLA established a branch campus in DC at the cost of $50 million. It celebrated the event by flying the UCLA marching band to Washington, which must’ve cost the University a few additional bucks.

Carol Folt, UCLA‘s president, described the new outpost as the “Trojan Embassy,“ as if the university is a nation unto itself. So many universities have placed campuses near Dupont Circle in Washington, that the area has been described as “a kind of Embassy Row for non-local higher Ed institutions "

Why are so many universities setting up shop hundreds of miles from their flagship campuses? College leaders articulate all kinds of high-minded motivations. Some told Inside Higher Ed that their institutions “are increasingly looking to establish or fortify bases for developing relationships with policymakers and grant writing government offices. UCLA’s president said she hopes the new campus will help UCLA “play a larger role in shaping federal policy “on a wide range of issues.

Another higher education spokesperson explained the universities’ presence in DC this way: “Between what’s going on in the political realm and what’s going on in the grant making world, it is becoming more competitive to get this federal funding, and these are huge parts of these campuses’ revenue streams…. They believe if they’re only planted in one spot, they’ll have less of a voice "

Or, as Willie Sutton might’ve put it, the universities are in Washington, DC, because that’s where the money is. Like crack addicts, American colleges are hooked on federal money, and they want to be closer to their supplier. Or, to use another analogy, the universities have become a bunch of hookers lined up on Pennsylvania Avenue—whores who will turn any trick for cash.

The colleges will say that their District of Columbia presence benefits students. In Washington, higher education leaders argue' students can learn the art of politics, policymaking, and grant writing.

I disagree. Washington, Like most American metropolises, is an increasingly dangerous place to live. Why would any student want to take out student loans to live in an expensive, crime-ridden city teaming with venal lobbyists, sociopathic politicians, and unelected bureaucrats who believe they have the divine right to tell Americans living in flyover country how to live their lives.

Moreover, a college education becomes more expensive with each passing year. Why should students pay for branch campuses in Washington, DC, which mainly exist to feed college leaders’ pathological hubris and grandiosity?

I’m bored: Let's go to war with Russia

Peter, Paul and Mary, the iconic folk singers from the 1960s, sang several songs protesting the war in Vietnam. “Where have all the young men gone?” they sang. “Gone for soldiers, every one.” And then the refrain: “When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”

Apparently, the answer to that question is not yet because our government is resolutely pushing the United States toward war with Russia.

So far, Ukraine is doing the fighting and dying in its year-long conflict with Russia, sustained by American weapons, technology and military expertise. Ukraine appears to be holding its own, but it would be a mistake to believe that Russia will simply give up and abandon its imperialistic ambitions to annex a portion of its western neighbor. Certainly, in my opinion, Russia will never surrender Crimea.

The American mainline media is fond of describing Russia as a regional power with an incompetent military and unstable leadership. I’m not sure that’s true.

Napoleon thought he had defeated Russia when he captured Moscow in 1812. In Napoleon’s mind, all that was left to do was wait for Russia’s military leaders to admit they had been beaten and formally surrender.

But the Russians never showed up to surrender. Instead, winter set in, and a cataclysmic fire burned down most of Moscow.

Rather than spend the winter in a burned out city, Napoleon decided to march his troops back to France. That’s when the Cossacks showed up. Russian cavalry harassed the French army on its long retreat and Napoleon lost ninety percent of his troops before he reached safety.

During World War II, Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of 1941 and drove the Russians back across a broad front. The Nazis made it to the outskirts of Moscow but they never captured the city. The Germans besieged Leningrad for 900 days but the Russians refused to surrender, although one million Leningrad civilians died from starvation during the siege.

Are there any lessons to be learned from history? I think there are. Russia may appear to be on the verge of defeat in its war with Ukraine, but that’s what Napoleon and Hitler believed when they picked a fight with Russia.

But what do I know about military strategy and geopolitical affairs? After all, I’m just a retired professor who lives smack dab in the middle of flyover country.

That’s a fair point. On the other hand, what do the bozos in Washington know about military strategy or the tangled history that connects Ukraine and Russia? Apparently, not much.

The witless diplomats and policy wonks who are recklessly pushing our country into war with a nuclear power probably think it’s fun to muck around in eastern European affairs. Who knows? They might get a lucrative book contract out of this fracas or a teaching gig at Harvard.

But what is their goal? Is it to weaken Russia or is it to weaken the United States?

I, for one, do not favor baiting the Russian bear. I do not want my children or grandchildren to suffer or die because some fools in Washington have no idea what the Russians are capable of.

Things fall apart: American civilization is collapsing and it's time to start paying attention

“Things fall apart," William Butler Yeats wrote in "The Second Coming," perhaps his most famous poem."The center cannot hold.”

Like many prophecies, Yeats's prediction took a long time to be realized. Now, a little more than a century after Yeats penned those words, his prophecy is finally coming true.

America, the greatest civilization in the history of mankind, is falling apart. The nation that sent 9 million men to Europe and the South Pacific during World War II and sacrificed 300,000 is crumbling. The country that accepted to its bosom the refugees from the Irish potato famine and found homes for the Vietnamese who fled the war in Southeast Asia is about to collapse.

Who would’ve thought that the United States, which conquered the Nazis in World War II, would sneak out of Afghanistan in the dead of night without bothering to tell its allies? Who would’ve thought that a nation dedicated to law and justice would allow criminals, terrorists, human traffickers, and fentanyl to flow across our southern border unmolested?

Our cities have become playgrounds for crime. Citizens who defend themselves against robbers and murderers get arrested while thugs with long criminal records roam the streets. The flagship retail stores of San Francisco are closing because shoplifting has become so rampant that a business cannot survive in one of America's greatest and most beautiful cities.

College presidents once boasted that American higher education is the envy of the world. Young people from across the globe came to the United States to study at our elite universities. Now our colleges have become insane asylums where students and professors spew racist nonsense, and greet reasoned dialogue with catcalls and profanity.

Our secondary schools have forgotten how to teach students to read, write, master grammar, and behave in a civil manner. Suppose young people who graduate from our derelict high schools wish to attend college. In that case, they must borrow extravagant amounts of money to study at institutions where the professors know nothing and have nothing to say.

In our elementary schools, so-called education experts believe it is beneficial to introduce small children to sexual perversion. Parents, who only want the best for their children, are denounced by the teacher's unions as terrorists.

A dysfunctional civilization can last a long time but cannot last forever. A nation that renounces its duty to maintain a safe and orderly society will eventually fall apart.

Like jackals stalking a wounded wildebeest, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran wait to feast on the carrion of a rotting America.

The economy is on the verge of collapse in flyover country, where ordinary Americans strive to live decently and raise their families. If you drive through the rural heartland, the small towns look like the villages of East Africa.

Virtually every American politician is a corporate lackey. Our president is noncompos mentis--the whole world knows that. No one thinks our vice president is capable of assuming presidential duties.

Meanwhile, the financial titans on Wall Street, the media elites, and the grifters who run our universities are getting rich and gloating over their pension plans and their hedge fund profits.

The ultra-wealthy don’t care about what happens to their less fortunate fellow Americans. They abandoned their civic commitments when they banked their first million dollars. They’ve placed their riches in gold and other safe assets. Many have at least one elegant bug-out shelter, perhaps in Costa Rica or Montana.

Armed guards protect the super-rich in their private fortresses. The scamps who accumulated obscene wealth will sip fine California wine and sigh sympathetically about the people on Social Security who starve to death after the economy craters, which it soon will.

But perhaps no one will escape the apocalypse. Marie Antoinette believed she was secure at Versailles and then lost her head. The czar thought his family was well protected by an elite corps of soldiers who had sworn to protect his wife and children. And then the Bolsheviks showed up, and we know what happened.

Watch for the deluge, for the center cannot hold.

Be grateful if you live in a temperate climate where you can grow a vegetable garden both summer and winter. Be grateful if you have basic survival skills. Be thankful if you live near water.

Cling to your family if you have a family. When the apocalypse comes, all you will have are your personal resources and your loved ones.

Surgeon General to fight “epidemic of loneliness”: I’m from the government and I’m here to help

Vivek Murthy, President Biden’s Surgeon General, issued an advisory a few days ago,alerting the nation to an epidemic of loneliness. According to Dr. Murphy’s report, about half of adult Americans experience loneliness, and the Surgeon General warned that loneliness can contribute to depression, high blood pressure, dementia, and other serious medical conditions.

Dr. Murphy announced a “National Strategy to Advance Social Connections Across Society." He called for more research on loneliness, and he pledged to enact pro-connection public policies and to cultivate a culture of connection in American life.

A few years ago, Americans would have greeted the Surgeon General’s advisory with derisive hoots and catcalls. Who believes the federal government can do anything to make Americans feel less lonely? What is Dr. Murthy proposing, Americans might once have asked: A government-run dating service?

Today, however, Dr. Murthy ‘s advisory is taken seriously. Maybe a few billion dollars in federally funded research at the nation’s elite universities will reveal how the nation can conquer loneliness After all, who knows more about loneliness than a university professor?

Perhaps federal money can banish loneliness from our daily lives, but I am skeptical. Americans once looked to their churches, their families, and social clubs for social connecutiveness. Unfortunately, many Americans have turned their backs on these institutions. Do we really think the federal government can provide the social connections that our religious faith, our families and our bowling leagues offer?

Besides, a little loneliness may not be such a bad thing. Throughout history, loneliness has inspired great art, great literature, and great music. Edward Hopper’s famous painting, “Nighththawks,” for example,masterfully captures the anomie and isolation of early 20th century urban life. J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye has spoken to generations of American adolescents because it is an almost perfect expression of youthful isolation.

Country music, perhaps America’s most original art form, speaks to millions of Americans because it expresses the loneliness that most of us feel from time to time. Roy Orbison's “Only the Lonely,” Johnny Cash’s “ I still Miss Someone,” and Merle Haggard’s “Looking for a Place to Fall Apart” are so powerful because they express one of the most basic of human emotions, which is loneliness.

In my view, the Surgeon General’s assault on the epidemic of loneliness will not make us less lonely. It will just make our loneliness more banal.

Racially segregated college graduation ceremonies: Are we nuts?

In one of its early school desegregation decisions, the United States Supreme Court expressed the hope that the day would come when there would not be black schools and white schools, but just schools. Now, nearly 70 years after the Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, America is drifting back toward racial segregation.

In recent years, colleges have begun sponsoring segregated graduation ceremonies for favored racial groups. At least one school even has a special graduation ceremony for LGBTQ students.

Of course, the colleges don’t describe these ceremonies as segregated. Rather, in the spirit of the Nazi propagandists, these racially exclusive ceremonies are called affinity events.

Of course, minority students can attend the general graduation ceremonies that are open to everyone, but only the favored groups get their own special graduation celebration.

When I was a child, the movie theater in my hometown was racially segregated. African-Americans could only attend the movies on Sunday evenings. I still remember groups of Black kids walking across the railroad tracks from the north side of town to watch movies that I could see on any day of the week. Could these racially segregated movie nights be properly labeled as affinity events?

Of course, woke academics would say there is a big difference 

between racial segregation in the 1950s and today’s racially segregated graduation ceremonies. But I am not so sure.

Once a university begins offering benefits and privileges to students based on race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, where does it stop? ? How different is a racially exclusive graduation ceremony from a whites-only fraternity or sorority?

A college education has become very expensive. It can cost a quarter of a million dollars to get a degree from an elite university. How do you suppose students in non-favored groups feel about their tuition money being used to subsidize race-based graduation ceremonies for students in favored racial groups?

It is the mission of the universities to prepare their students to thrive in a racially and culturally diverse society. Holding special graduation ceremonies based on race, ethnicity or sexual orientation is contrary to that mission.

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Intimations of Mortality: The Tulsa Edition

 Last month I was in Tulsa dealing with a stressful family crisis. On April 16, I experienced the first of a series of minor strokes that culminated in a major stroke that paralyzed the left side of my body.  I experienced my third mini-stroke at night while in a Tulsa hospital. I believed I would die and was surprised to realize that I was not afraid.

I was terrified of death when I was a child. My father spent most of the Second World War in a Japanese concentration camp. I was born three years after he was liberated. I know now that my father suffered from severe PTSD. As a four-year-old, I found the only way I could engage him was to ask him about his war experiences.

Unfortunately, my father told me more than I could absorb as a child. He told me about American prisoners who committed suicide because they were weak. He told me about prisoners who were executed. He told me about the day he was being transported in a prison ship that was bombed by American Navy pilots, who did not know that the ship contained American prisoners.

I remember my father telling me about the men who could not swim who were standing on the deck of the sinking ship, begging other prisoners to save them. But the prisoners who could swim were too enfeebled by captivity to help their comrades, and the men who couldn’t swim were drowned. 

My father's stories terrified me. He had survived the Japanese concentration camps because he was strong. I was just a child. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to live through the kind of horror he experienced. I would be one of the weak prisoners who would die.

I grew up in a small Oklahoma town. Many of my childhood friends belonged to religious groups that believed anyone who was not a member of their particular denomination was going to burn in hell for eternity.  

I was a gullible kid, and my childhood buddies were sincere in their efforts to proselytize me. Nevertheless, I never figured out which denomination was God's chosen Church. Was it the Baptists, the Pentecostals, the Nazarenes, or the Church of Christ? I never figured that out but I was terrified of dying and going to hell. I did not shake off that fear until I was an adult.

Elie Wiesel was put in a Nazi concentration camp as a child during World War II. In his memoir of that experience, he said he was introduced to death at an age when children should know nothing about death except what they read in story books. Weisel was right. Children should be protected from the terrors of life, real or imagined. They will learn soon enough when they are older.

Now I’m 74 years old and recovering from a stroke. Death is near. Maybe I will live five or six more years, or maybe I will die tomorrow. 

I believe in God. He is not powerful enough to protect us from famine, plague, or disease. He could not stop Hitler or Stalin.  Nevertheless, God has filled the earth with beauty and sprinkled it with people who love their families and their fellow humans and are capable of great sacrifice in the service of others. 

When I die, I wish to be cremated and my ashes scattered on the banks of the upper Colorado river in West  Texas. I have sinned and suffered a great deal, but God has blessed me with a lovely wife and family. I live ln one of America's most beautiful states. I have known the goodness of God in the land of the living. I am grateful.